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Exploring the Superconscious

Interview with Dr Edward Bynum, author of Dark Light Consciousness

Author: Jair Robles

We are all familiar with its symbolic representations, be it from the caduceus used by modern medicine, the winged serpent of Prehispanic Mesoamerican cultures or the dragons commonly seen at most Asian celebrations. It is said to represent a dormant energy that lies within every one of us, at the base of the spine, and that when this energy is awakened and driven into the brain it opens up our access to higher states of consciousness and our connection to the divine. Much of the disciplines and practices developed by the ancient traditions and practiced at the mystery schools were geared to this sole purpose.

It is refreshing and exciting to find that current scientists and scholars, such as Dr Edward Bynum, are making an effort to bring this knowledge back for the scrutiny and study of modern science. In his most recent book, Dark Light Consciousness, Dr Bynum combines physics, neuroscience and biochemistry with some of these ancient traditions from Africa and India. He explores the ancient Egyptian science of the Ureaus and reveals how it is intimately connected to melanin, a light-sensitive substance found in the brain and nervous system and how neuromelanin serves as the biochemical infrastructure for the subtle energy body.

Dr Edward Bruce Bynum is a clinical psychologist and director of behavioral medicine at the University of Massachusetts Health Services in Amherst. He is the author of five books and a winner of the Abraham H. Maslow award, given in recognition for outstanding contributions to Humanistic Psychology by the American Psychological Association.

SuperConsciousness recently spoke with Dr Edward Bynum about his most recent book and the empirical evidence he has observed based on his practice of Yoga for more than thirty years and how, through the process of raising the Ureaus, we can intentionally direct our own spiritual evolution.

SuperConsciousness: You have been recognized within the field of psychology and, from reading your books, it is also evident that you are a scholar of the mystery schools and also an adept of spiritual practice, particularly yoga. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey, how did you get to where you are right now?

Dr Edward Bynum: Currently I work at the University of Massachusetts Health Services and the Center for Counseling and Psychological Health. I'm not a Professor; I'm a regular day-to-day clinical psychologist and doctor. I see patients and treat them in a traditional brief psychotherapy context. With a significant percentage of the patients I see, I use what would be thought of as complimentary or alternative approaches to clinical practices, meaning that I use clinical hypnosis and computerized bio-feedback. Since I see a lot of patients, I treat/experience psychosomatic issues and syndromes of one kind or another.

In terms of how I got interested in this, like the overwhelming majority of us, I grew up within the two great cultures of our Age; the culture of science and technology and also the culture of religion and spirituality. It has been part of my life’s work and research to find a way that these two can talk to each other because they certainly talk to me. Early on I wanted to be some kind of scientist and, at the same time, I have always felt the spiritual pull and felt or heard about the supposed conflict between these two.

So those are the roots of my search as a seeker. After graduate school, in clinical practice, using clinical hypnosis in particular, naturally led me to other forms of introspection. Eventually I began looking around for an established methodology that allowed me to explore the empirical side of the spiritual process in more detail. That in turn led me to yoga and eventually to kundalini yoga in particular.

Those were my footsteps and other people obviously are different. But I, as a scientifically oriented person, needed something that could be both methodological and empirical. Yoga was the closest that allowed me to do that and I have stayed with it for the last three decades.

SC: What was the main purpose for writing the book, Dark Light Consciousness?

EB: The main purpose of this book, Dark Light Consciousness, is actually the culmination of a five part series of books that I had conceived when I first came to the university three decades ago. My first book was The Family Unconscious, then I did Families and the Interpretation of Dreams, and then The Roots of Transcendence. In the early part of this decade, I wrote The African Unconscious in order to explore my long-standing interest in our collective human African genesis, not only genetically, historically and psychologically, but also the collective roots of ancient mysticism in all its forms. Dark Light Consciousness is the final book in the series and this one in particular plunges more in-depth and detail about my own spiritual practice and clinical experience.

I was trying to put into words what my own yoga practice has revealed to me and how it seems to be reflective of other spiritual disciplines and traditions. I was trying as much as I could, not only as a clinician, but also as a scholar and researcher to bring these together. So I really had put everything in there. Dark Light Consciousness is really a very practical book on methodology, of my own thought and spiritual practice, what has worked for me and my shortcomings as a practitioner.

SC: Within your description of this book, you mention a new field of science called neurotheology. What is neurotheology?

EB: Neurotheology is an emerging field based on the research of clinicians, primarily, but also laboratory people and neurosurgeons, about what happens in the brain when we are in atypical states of consciousness brought about by contemplative disciplines and prayer. One of the most noted books on this laboratory research is by Newberg and Rouse called, Brain Science and the Biology of Belief or Why God Won't Go Away?

They used what's called a SPECT camera, (it's an acronym for Single Proton Emissions Computed Tomography). What they did, essentially, is used this brain technology on people in deep states of meditation and saw what correlated, what corresponded in the brain’s neurostructure, when they were in these profound, subjective states.

What they were able to notice is that certain areas of the brain, in particular, would be highlighted. There was an increased amount of blood flow and neuroactivity or heightened activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex. In particular, they noticed an area of local gray matter, which is actually what’s termed “neuromelanin”, in the top section of the brain, in the region known as the “posterior superior parietal lobe”. It's generally called the “orientation association area”. They found that this area really became intensely activated with people who were in states of deep meditation. This area, by the way, this orientation association area, is the one that literally orients us in space by letting us know what's up, down, east, west, the angle of things, distance and so on, essentially generating a clear sense of the physical world itself and of ourselves in the physical world.

When that area is delimited, ablated or what’s termed “deafferentated”, the experience of space itself and our psychological boundaries within that space disappear. This is precisely what happens and what is reported in states of deep meditation and so-called “mystical experience”. The point is that when you apply certain meditative disciplines, and there are many disciplines that can do this, these limited or quieted areas of the brain calm down even more and what seems to come forth is a profound sense of timelessness and spacelessness. In other words there's a subjective experience of what we call the infinite or the eternal.

Neurotheology is the field that explores what happens to us when we enter these states. This is not at all to reduce spiritual experiences to brain pathology, but more about what happens when we are able to influence and control the brain at a higher level. What kind of situation that is already implicitly there, emerges? Is it, perhaps, the direct conscious experience of the ineffable, the eternal and infinite? This is already here. It's not that we created it; it's only being discovered or revealed to our more localized consciousness.

What I'm trying to say is that we don’t create spirituality; it's more like we discover it. We develop our instruments sufficiently to perceive areas of the world or the universe that have always been there. Refined physical instruments reveal a deeper cosmos of multiple dimensions to us; a refined contemplative discipline reveals a deeper soul and consciousness to us.

SC: An element that is central within your book, and is related to all that you have just mentioned, is melanin and neuromelanin. What is the relationship of melanin and neuromelanin with dark matter, light and evolution?

EB: First off, there's a difference between melanin and neuromelanin. Melanin is on the surface of the skin. It's pretty variable and even has different degrees of lightness and darkness in the skin of the same person. It is surface structure. It can also be variable between members of the same family. Obviously this happens between different groups of people, races and so forth. It's highly variable and not that significant unless we are using it to classify society and provide a pseudo scientific reason to kill each other. What is really significant is an altogether different form of melanin. They're related, but they are not the same. The other form of melanin is what we find in the brain and the nervous system. That melanin is called neuromelanin and it's both deep structure and universal.

The reason I found it so fascinating is that of all the animals on the earth, the ones that are more highly evolved are those with more neuromelanin in their brain and spinal area. Neuromelanin is literally dark and, as darkness, it crucially absorbs light.

As I said of all the animals of the earth, it is the mammals that have the higher concentration of neuromelanin in their spinal line and covering the brain in certain strategic areas. Of all the mammals the ones with the higher concentration of neuromelanin are the primates. Of all the primates, the ones that have the highest concentration are the great apes with the chimpanzee leading them. The only one that's even more than the chimpanzee in the spinal line, brain surface and brain core is us, Homo sapiens sapiens or thinking human beings. It seems to me that there's a pretty tight correlation here between increasing neuromelanin in the brain, spinal cord and the pathway of evolution.

Melanin and neuromelanin are biopolymers. What they do is literally absorb light, they absorb photons and quanta and transduce them. They literally transduce light from one state to another, from light to heat to vibration and so on and so forth.

Another phenomenal thing is that neuromelanin is dark and it is not because it's on the surface of the skin. Unlike skin melanin it's not in direct contact with the sun. It's appears to be some other kind of phenomenon highly correlated with the trajectory of evolution at least here on earth. I also find it interesting that the universe, the physical universe, we are led to understand is roughly ninety-three percent or so composed of some sort of mysterious “cold dark matter”. We also have this warm living dark matter on the surface and in the deep structure of our brains and bodies, including the surface of our internal organs and, very importantly for those who practice yoga, the innermost lining of our spinal column. You don’t have to be a mystic or a poet to sense how this outside or external cold dark matter seems to mirror the current of warm dark matter structuring and running through our body, spinal lines and brains.

SC: Much of the information and techniques in your book are accredited to the mystery schools of the Kemetic Egyptians. Who were the Kemetic Egyptians?

EB: The Kemetic Egyptians were the indigenous Egyptians. They're the Egyptians who were there before Europeans, the Greco Roman period and before the invasions of the Middle East. They were the indigenous African population, which means they were the people who established and created that civilization and it lasted as an independent civilization until about 1200 BCE or so.

The most conservative date of European Egyptologists is that it began around 3500 BCE, but actually if you look at the water erosion marks of the Sphinx, climatic data, and certain aspects of the pyramids, you'll see that their civilization actually goes way back before the pyramid age to probably closer to 10500 BCE. That’s the time when the Kemetic Egyptians themselves documented the dawn of their own civilization. What's called Zep Tepi or the “splendid time of the first time”.

The Sphinx is oriented to look into the constellation Leo, the lion, on the vernal equinox in 10500 BCE. It was acknowledged at a later time that the Sphinx had been there much longer, had been excavated several times by different rulers, and because of water erosion marks at the base, its limestone base. It was probably erected well before 10500 BCE in order to look directly into the constellation Leo, on the morning of the vernal equinox, 10500 BCE. So that civilization goes back to that time, Zep Tepi. Let’s be clear. It is the European interpreters and conquerors who say that civilization began 3500 BCE, not the indigenous Kemetic Egyptians or their written chronicles.

Those are the people that gave us the pyramids, the Sphinx, a vast medical library that was only surpassed in Europe in the 19th century. Their spiritual sciences were advanced, as were their exacting physical sciences of mathematics, trigonometry and algebra. Look at the precision of the pyramids and their stellar alignments and, because of mummification, the extraordinary knowledge acquired about the body and the brain. Only about ten of these medical papyrus survived into our day but there were literally hundreds and hundreds of medical papyri that were studied in the houses of life or per ankhs along the Nile, for literally thousands and thousands of years. So that's all lost, yes lost to us, echoes of a vanished age.

That civilization, I would point out, had a long-time, long-standing correspondence with the civilizations of the Indus Valley in what's called India today. So between ancient Kemetic Egypt and ancient Dravidian southern India, they went back and forth in trade, spiritual practices, and so forth. In fact, some of their sacred words are even the same. I have tried to detail this along with those disciplines in specific chapters of Dark Light Consciousness, especially in their relationship to neuromelanin and the process of biological and spiritual evolution.

SC: One of the main points of interest of your book is the practical aspect and it comes from these traditions that you are talking about. A key element is the awakening of the Uraeus. What is the Uraeus?

EB: The Uraeus is the ancient Kemetic Egyptian term for the twin serpents that are perceived to move along the spinal cord and through the spinal line during the spiritual process. The Dravidian Indians refer to it as kundalini. If you look at almost every culture and tradition of our species in the planet, there is some reference to this. The Maya, the Inca, the West Africans, every civilization has talked about energy moving along the spinal line and it’s association with the movement or arousal of a consciousness and energy that is directly experienced. It’s even in symbolic form when you go into a regular physician’s office today.

In Dark Light Consciousness I’m merely picking up what is implicit in all of the world’s cultures and trying to see what emerges if I look at it as a modern clinician. What could that tell me? That’s what I try to do and how I brought the notion of neuromelanin and neuroscience into it. What is the neuroscience background to this phenomenon?

Awakening that energy, in all the traditions, is the beginning of the spiritual process, and that Uraeus is usually asleep at the base of the spine in the majority of us, but it is possible to awaken it.

In all the great, practical, spiritual traditions in the past, that was what you did, that was what you worked on. Lots and lots of different disciplines and techniques of various kinds were devised to awaken this energy and to lead it successfully up the spinal line until it goes into the brain stem, through the brain core, obviously into the higher cerebral structures to the frontal lobe, and then emerges to beyond.

For me, the most sophisticated, well-known and empirically validated, replicable ways have been devised by the ancient Kemetic Egyptians and the Dravidian practitioners of kundalini yoga in ancient and modern India.

SC: From your experience and observations what would be some of the indicators that this energy is being awakened?

EB: There are two levels to that. One is the awakening of energy that can be felt but it’s not the Uraeus or the Kundalini itself. It’s more like an energy stirring that you feel along your spinal line, a vibration, a certain degree of emotional intoxication that will come with that, and it feels pretty good.

However, the actual Kundalini, the Uraeus experience has a different signature, and the first sensation is usually a sense of piercing, heat, or pressure until there’s sort of a breakthrough from the base of the spine and then it moves up. At each point there are certain clinical signs that you can notice. They’re not symptoms but they’re definitely distinct experiences, some of which can be uncomfortable at times, psychologically and otherwise.

It begins with those and then usually a vibration of back and forth or from side to side, and sometimes a rotating sensation. But it’s definitely a movement up, and it can be blocked and that’s why you have a teacher to help you move through that. There are certain critical points in which there’s a bit of a crisis, and one of them is when it first pierces through the bottom. Another one is when it reaches the area around the heart center. There’s a certain kind of pressure or piercing experience that goes on there, and that’s why the Hindu Yogis developed some of these sophisticated methodologies to be able to help conduct that energy through them.

Another major blockage area — if you want to think of it as blockage — occurs around what is the throat area, and there’s a final one that happens between the eyes or the brow point. That’s why I pay so much attention to the Kemetic Egyptians and the Hindu Yogis because they talk about these in detail. They map it out, it’s very empirical and it’s very scientific in the way we think of scientific today. It is a science with no allegiance or antipathy to any religion.

SC: Your book gives a lot of detail on different techniques and lots of descriptions about how one can engage in these practices. For someone who is interested in engaging in this process what would be their first step or the most important element to accomplish initially?

EB: Quite frankly, the first step would be to read about it in some depth and detail, not only in terms of how it emerges in your own culture and background, but also in other cultures and backgrounds. Become literate. Be willing to observe yourself. Don’t take anything on blind faith, but please do educate yourself.

Another one that you can do correspondingly is to be overall in moderately good physical health. In other words, it is actually a physically demanding process, and you need to make sure that you have a healthy body, a healthy diet, and, if involved with someone, in a healthy relationship.

The third very important one is that you have a basic, solid, publicly expressible moral and ethical base. Now, you say what difference does that make? Well, one of the ways that it makes a difference is that there are certain critical points in the process where you’re sort of emotionally naked so to speak, out in front of yourself. Your own unconscious tendencies and styles become manifest, so you have to be humble, self-accepting, have a sense of humor, and know that your moral and ethical behavior is at least okay. As the Uraeus moves through your midbrain limbic system the personal and primordial or collective unconscious is stimulated with corresponding imagery and sensations. This will be at times exciting, frightening and embarrassing but always revealing. You will not have the luxury of only pure and noble sentiments and imagery. So you see you need to be on relatively good terms with your own unconscious.

Otherwise, the system unfortunately can turn upon itself and that’s not very pleasant. Those moral prescriptions of things you do and things you don’t do are really important. It’s not just some abstract moral and ethical code, no. It has to do with self-survival, self-maintenance and self-care. It’s actually an important selfish thing to do, just like taking care of your self physically.

SC: When you talk about some of the more advanced stages achieved from raising that energy and bringing it up to the brain, you mentioned that one of the effects is neurogenesis. How can we take this opportunity to imprint these new neurons with our own intent?

EB: Neurogenesis is a phenomenon recognized only in the last 20 years or so by modern medicine. That is that the brain, the adult human brain, regenerates and continues to generate new nerve cells. The other thing that has been discovered is that it seems to be closely aligned with intentionality, in other words, where you focus your attention, phenomena happens. To bring that into conscious control is part of what the tradition of yoga is about. The adepts of both India and ancient Kemetic Egypt talked and worked on this a great deal. In India, they were called adepts and in Kemetic Egypt they were called the Shining Ones.

They essentially used the focus of attention and intentionality to help the brain grow in a certain way. In the literature of ancient India, they talk about the cave — what is called the cave of Brahma — and here the Kundalini process is said to enter into it and in the process of entering into it, stimulates that area, stimulates brain neural activity in the cave of Brahma, such that a new function or a new capacity in the brain, a new subtle neural structure emerges. What that means in my perspective is that it is literally conscious interaction with the force of evolution itself. Evolution is not over, evolution continues, and this is a way the Yogis have found to interact with evolution not only on an intimate profound personal scale, but also a psychocosmic scale. That’s potentially what neurogenesis can do.

Neurogenesis happens spontaneously in lots of other ways when the brain needs to heal itself and so on and so forth, which is not only necessary, but obviously a good thing. But what happens when we bring conscious attention to certain areas? We can actually influence the process in a conscious and intentional way. For my money I think it’s a phenomenal discovery of modern neuroscience, and one that we can harvest for our spiritual evolution.

SC: Through this process of raising the Uraeus, we can access different levels of consciousness and you also call them planes of mind. Can you give a brief description of the different planes of mind that you talk about?

EB: Very briefly, our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been around for 150,000, to 200,000 years. Before that time we were preceded by more “primitive” forms of Homo sapiens, those were Homo erectus, Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and a number of other variations of Homo sapiens. Before them for millions of years were the tribes of Australopithecines. They all had a limbic system, which means they had powerful emotions. That’s what the limbic system does; it creates, modulates and stores powerful emotions of awe, anger, violence, terror, sympathy, empathy, kinship and so on. All of that preceded our current midbrain limbic system’s existence and is still there, active and filtered out, below the reefs. When our species came along, all of that stayed with us as dynamic inheritance. That’s what we think of as our “lower mind”.

By the time we became Homo sapiens sapiens, that became part of the deep structure of our own unconscious mind, the inheritance of the Australopithecines and early Homo sapiens from millions of years ago. That is our archaic reasoning, our fight-or-flight response, our desires, our fears, all of that, our primordial dream level of consciousness.

Eventually we emerged to where we generally are today, what we would normally see as our day-to-day thinking, where we have a thin cover of rationality and reason, but underneath that is a lot of magical thinking and strong unconscious motives and drives. This is really the Freudian area of exploration, the unconscious normative mind that includes the magical thinking and primitive drives and conflicts but also the strategizing ego.

Then for me, and a number of others, Sri Aurobindo being one of my great heroes and teachers, describes us having a “higher mind”. We all recognize it even if we cannot realize it just yet. That’s where we think of noble characters and the people we look up to for higher aspirations. It is what is called the hero or “ego ideal” in Freudian language. These are the best of the best, they represent our higher calling in behavior and code, “do the right thing”, the noble knights of legend and myth, and all that can be projected to the higher mind.

Beyond that level is what can be referred to as an “illuminated mind”. That’s when the all-pervasive light of unspeakable reality breaks through in little flashes of insight, in moments of sublime creativity, especially in the arts and sciences. Moments like these reveal parts of a greater truth, the hidden consciousness of things if you want to, and it’s not right on the logical path but it comes from many different places. It’s almost like a channeling experience from a higher source, the translating of a greater truth. It’s very difficult to sustain, obviously. Think of great music, great poetry, the chords and choruses of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or flashes of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Those are expressions of the illuminated mind.

Then, above or deeper than that is an “intuitive mind”, an intuitive intelligence level of mind, where things are understood or apprehended beyond the linguistic and the physical. They’re understood in a symbiotic resonant way. The fragmentation we have seen before this level begins to decrease and there are more and more episodes of unitive conscious experience where we understand things less from the perspective of this happening because that occurred because of that, etc., and more that things seem to come together all at once based on some another causal template. It’s a more prolonged contact with the inner essence of things. It’s that intuitive intelligence level. We perceive a basic aliveness of things, simultaneity, experiences of transcendence and more and more of those flashes of illuminated states.

Beyond that is what Sri Aurobindo and others refer to as the “over mind”. At this level there’s a sustained unity seen progressively everywhere. It’s really the founding of a deep religious intuition, of an all pervading light and intelligence everywhere transcending normative intuitions of space, time and localized matter. It’s the plane of spiritual vision and gives rise to new religions in humanity. It’s really the summit, the last stage of mentalized consciousness. Just as the Australopithecines millions of years ago, they were conscious, like our dog is conscious but he is not necessarily conscious in a “mental” way. But he was still conscious. This is the other end of that, the end of mentalized consciousness. When the ancient Vedic Reishis of India and the Shining Ones of Kemet were talking that’s what they were talking about. That was being the direct perception and apprehension of the radiant divine.

SC: Is that what other people call Christ consciousness?

EB: Moving into it, yes. The boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and words clumsy, but tapping into that, you’re right, the Christ consciousness. And I believe this is the future domain of our species, the cosmic race, the Homo noeticus. It’s really only from there that the supramental consciousness or the super conscious state emerges that this magazine is devoted to. This is the all-pervasive consciousness that has consumed and translated the limited individual or “I” consciousness. When there’s no more I, there’s no more personal experience. You go from transformations to translation into the divine milieu. That seems to be, in my limited experience and what I can understand from others who sustained it, the way that it progresses. It’s a natural progression.

SC: Now that you are talking about higher levels of consciousness, in the book you also talk about sacred geometry and how by focusing on certain geometric shapes can be used for spiritual travel or dimensional travel.

EB: A lot of people have an intuitive understanding about this because we recognize that there are four dimensions we experience on a day-to-day basis. There are the physical dimensions of space, depth, width and length and then the dimension of time. And we know that space and time form in Einstein’s relativity the dimension of space-time.

Many people understand light itself as sort of a fifth dimension. It makes sense mathematically and in physics to understand light as a fifth dimensional phenomenon. Because light occurs in space-time but it is not limited to space-time, light is really a fifth dimension. There are many physicists that have come to think about gravity itself as kind of a sixth dimension in the sense of the way it interacts with space and time, because gravity is a weak force that seems to pervade or bleed through all the other dimensions.

The work with sacred geometry goes back to when Plato was studying in Egypt, along with a number of other ancient Greek luminaries, including Pythagoras. They studied in the per ankhs banks of the Nile. Pythagoras studied in Egypt, I believe, for 20 years, before leaving and starting his own mystery school. It was all about vibrating strings and unseen dimensions. Sounds familiar?

They studied sacred shapes and the harmonies of different shapes and vibrations as the way that the universe was structured and progressed, or how one migrated as a soul through the universe, which was through vibration and different shapes. By learning how to communicate, and some even master, but definitely communicate with those shapes by manipulating them, you can in certain states of consciousness, at least briefly, manipulate the sensation, the experience of travel.

I and many of you reading this have had dreams where we were able to manipulate the shape of the so-called Platonic solids and been able to shift our sense of time and space in the dream state. In the ancient mystery schools of Rome, there were a couple of religions, in particular, that spent an enormous amount of their spiritual energy manipulating and meditating on different shapes. Until it got to the point where it was intuitively felt, rather than an intellectual exercise, it was believed that they could maneuver these shapes and in the process of maneuvering these shapes they were able to control their light body or their spiritual body. So this is where that tradition comes from and I do believe that as a species, as we move further into this century, and psychology and psychiatry move beyond their preoccupation with the nineteen century understanding of matter, that we’re going to begin to explore and rediscover this.

Essentially, we will rediscover the psychology of our forebearers, not only of ancient Rome but also more remotely and originally the banks of the Nile, Kemetic Egypt, India and Tibet, as well as other parts of the world. All cultures have had some experience with this. This and the other things we have talked about are what the mystery schools were about.

SC: As the last question for this interview, I’m going to refer to a quote from your book: “Psychology so far has done a good job of exploring the unconscious, ‘below us’, with its murky impulses, images and dark forces. Now psychology must be free to explore the superconscious ‘above us’ and its supraluminous realty.” What is the reaction from your peers when you make a statement like this? How open is psychology for the exploration of these techniques presented in your book and others from the mystery schools you mentioned?

EB: Well there are two streams in the academic field that are very receptive to this. The majority doesn’t have language for it yet but there are a few subsystems or subgroups within the American Psychological Association in particular that are open to this. One is the Association for Humanistic Psychology. They recognize that humanity is an ongoing process and they are exploring this, and one of the other groups are those in transpersonal psychology. They are overtly and explicitly open to this. There are also APA psychologists interested in religion and many in the association of Black psychologists with an abiding interest in these areas. So the humanistic branch of psychology, the transpersonal branch of psychology, and those two others are leading the way, I believe. I’m only one of these numerous other people trying to bring this empirical information into the wider areas of psychology, psychiatry and neurology. It’s much further along than it was 20 or 30 years ago. It was inaudible; now it’s clear and distinct and growing, though still a minority voice. I believe this is the pathway of our species, I really do.